Player-coach used to be a thing in professional sports a long, long time ago. There's a reason you don't have it anymore. A coach can't be expected to take the long-term view while also expecting to contribute. Most examples were players near the end of their career and they didn't tend to do very well.
The only place you see it is in fun adult leagues. Perhaps the message then is that Coinbase wants to be less professional and more amateur-like?
Actually, these scenarios happen in hockey as well. Teams will pick up character guys who have been through it all who are expected to contribute more off ice than on it. Corey Perry is one who comes to mind lately but they're never given a "coach" title. It's entirely possible though that these players may be expected to be a go-between guy between the coach and younger players to help them manage the pressure or to help with encouragement. They're definitely not getting prime minutes though.
I guess that would possibly be the same expectation of a manager who still codes. I can't see them doing anything critical. It's likely picking up some minor bugs or nice-to-have, low priority feature work. I was a manager before and while I didn't reach 15 reports, I was up to 12 at one time. There's just really no focus time that you need for coding. Maybe that's a bit different with AI but even then you still need to find time to make changes and validate. And that's time that takes away from other higher impact things that you could be doing for the team.
In the end, everyone is replaceable. But a king is a bit more difficult to replace, as historically shown.
And I don't think they're trying this thing that Coinbase is trying either.
With very rare exceptions, professional athletes are just not as good athletically at 40/50 as they were at 20. They may be smarter in some ways--which maybe means they'd be better as coaches.
I'm not sure this carries over well to engineering unless you mean that the young people are willing to grind for a lot more hours on nights and weekends.
not sure if focus should be on athletic sports. Chess is better analogy to software I think.
When building software, if you can state an unambiguous goal and what rules apply you are more than halfway done. It's not uncommon to work on something for a year and discover you have been building the wrong thing. Navigating that ambiguity is where all the value in software engineering is.
He won the 2004 Euro Championship, the 2005 FIFA Beach Soccer World Cup along with a number of top 4 places over his 15 years as player and/or coach.
But managers should mostly be about two things IMHO:
> Facilitating for ICs.
> COACHING. To elevate ICs and help propagate the desired "culture".
“We at the coding company LovelyBeeBunny should be like the samurai’s of the old, willing to pull our swords to die for emperor…” etc. And it is always riddled with complete misunderstanding of the analogous subject, whether sports, history, or warfare.
When I grew up those were the very definition of "not girly". Our math and comp sci faculties at uni would bend over backwards for any of the girl students.
I would agree though that academics in general were "not manly" and at school at least streams of "academic" or "sporty" existed. For boys anyway.
For the girls (less fascinated by sports) the top sporties were often top academics as well.
History has shown that being academic is always better than sporty (if you gave to pick one.) The "status" given to sports is often an acknowledgment that it's a poor financial path, but we can offer "status" instead.
Yes, sports metaphors can be amusing, but its the winners we're smiling at.
There's a reason for this change. As players became elite and specialized by position, the budget for specialization expanded. At the top, teams could afford a distinct role for coaching focus. Since the stakes are really high (the difference between 1-3 points is measured in dozens of millions of dollars of impact due to relegation - a concept that is missing on most US elite sports) it follows specialization drive is sky-high at elite levels.
Thus, soccer player coaches have mostly dissappeared at elite level. But the role is alive and well in the semipro tier.
In roles where there's no binary, extreme outcome from specialization, like in semi pro soccer, or at an ENG role at a random company , it is only natural to have someone wear multiple hats and not specialize.
The payoff to being elite at a valuable skill is enormous. Teams generally benefit more from combining players with distinct, elite strengths than from relying on broad generalists who are not truly elite at anything.
This isn’t always possible if you can’t afford to build a team of specialists, or those specialists don't exist at your level of competition. But if you have the resources and coordination (and in sports, the roster depth and cap space) to cover each specialist’s weaknesses, specialization is pretty much always the stronger composition.
sounds stupid to me
for example, the last obvious inefficiency i remember was sys admins. the most worthless, self aggrandizing group of people at any company. got wiped out mostly (the best work for the cloud engineering companies), and i think it was for the better!
engineers today handle deployments, and it is far better.
Too bad AI is not about efficiency. It's about headcount reduction, which is exactly what Coinbase is doing here. AI just gives them plausible cover.
Feels like a problem that will solve itself. There are more cars today than people ever had horses.
I’ve worked with many mids but most people were really good. They’re all even better now.
In both technical and non technical roles.
I think people who are average skill at their jobs are about to be rocked if I’m honest.
Not by me. I know you'll go out of business if you pay employees 2.5x your competition.
It will even turn out ok if the other 4 people find new work that pays the same. But if everyone fires 4 out of 5 employees because they're focused on "run my business more efficiently" to the exclusion of everything else...it's not going to end well for any society.
I'm remember of when I went out for drinks with a startup consultant friend and she mentioned one founder she spoke with refer to his staff as "biological units" when addressing use of proceeds to hire additional staff.
A company_is_ the sum of its people, their talents and aligned behind a mission statement.
This is so far misguided, I can't help but think this 'biological unit' of a founder won't last long.
That could be an incentive to keep companies small, but high-scale companies do have unique benefits to society.
This is absolutely not true. It never has been at any point in history. Not even CEOs would claim such a thing until the 1980s, and they were wrong then as now.
Even today, Costco and other businesses are thriving.
Stop drinking the Koolaid.
The CEO is looking at revenue and at costs. He can see what will happen if current burn rate isn’t reduced. Doesn’t it come (in part) to numbers, which must be reduced/scaled as needed? (Along with other costs)
> Also, I find it really bizarre that those neo feudal lords see their companies as just a life stock to count. They don't even count people, just see them as numbers to reduce/scale up. Modern tsardom, but instead of being tied via official decree you're now tied by your lifestyle and family.
People don't work somewhere like Coinbase if they're concerned about morality or mitigating the harms done to society.
The GP post describes a common problem in _most_ workplaces in the market today. It’s not specific to crypto, AI, or anything in between.
It is not specific to a crypto company. But the element of it being a crypto company cannot be ignored. Crypto companies are not like ordinary businesses. They have very unique qualities to them. Same with crypto industry as a whole. Ever been to a crypto conference for example? I have read about and have seen the videos. These things have the highest concentration of the scammers and the gullible any one place.
Actually, it sounds like you’re the one who hasn’t been to a crypto conference :)
And then this person leaves, leaving no documentation or workflow. That's ok though, another ai agent will pick up right back and add slop on top of that until the codebase is a black box interacting with another black box.
Oh and this company handles other people's money? That's going to end well.
Reggie Dunlop is ready for duty, he'll get the job done.
This is a really strange nit. You are aware it's an analogy about skill and role. To reduce this to being about biology and the impacts of senescence on ability is weird, and doesn't really apply here.
E.g. you can't just spew nonsense like "let's work together like a bee hive, everything for the Queen/CEO, no matter the personal cost to an individual" without others pointing out the stupidity of comparing humans with bees.
You can't just come up with a desirable adjective and start coming up with random scenarios in which those characteristics may occur. "Let's make the company strong as a gorilla, big as an elephant, smart as Von Neumann, bright as a Sun, as courageous as young guys from youtube fails compilations." This makes no sense whatsoever.
Sure, there are good player-coaches, but there are also great pure leaders. There are also very bad player-coaches. A coach who is trying too hard and too deep to be a player when they are less "fit" (or skilled) has historically led to many problems in many cases
There's not much equivalent to "fit" here, just skill, and they decided they don't want the pure leaders, they want ones that are knuckle deep in the sausage.
Good decision or not, that very basic analogy is completely fine.
Exactly. People are too naive these days
I don't think anyone is applauding this. The only people applauding stuff like this are the CEO's of Anthropic (because that means more tokens/profit). Most other CEO's in big tech have toned down the rhetoric big-time.
The job of 5 people being done with the same salary is a function of the job market. It's an employers market now. So stuff like this happens. If you had an employee's market this wouldn't happen.
fwiw - and this is a separate topic. If health insurance were de-linked from employment most people would flee the job market on their own.
That would be visible in all major markets outside of the US, no?
Like the guy who "just gets math" is often NOT a good teacher.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unionization_in_the_tech_secto...
The benefits of unionization extend beyond this particular situation or company.
They can help shift the balance of power back to the employee and help them guard against being squeezed by their employer to produce more or take on more work for less benefits or compensation.
American tech workers have been fortunate to avoid such aggressive practices, but working conditions will only deteriorate from here, with workers crushed between LLMs and offshoring.
The crypto market winter that started in Q4 last year led to Coinbase's ~worst quarter ever ($667M loss). Crypto has not recovered. Coinbase has done nothing to stem the outflows. That same quarter HOOD showed a net profit of $605M; and showed a $346M profit last week. COIN and HOOD are two very similar companies.
COIN's earnings are in two days. They preceded the earnings call with layoffs, which is always a bad sign. And HOOD's net income has dropped by like 40%, though they're still at least profitable. You should be prepared for COIN to announce a similar drop; except, COIN wasn't even profitable before. Its going to be a bloodbath.
Edit: it’s because the loss is an accounting loss due to mark to market adjustment, while the company is operationally profitable.
I assume that’s still no great, but not nearly as dire as the reported loss suggests, and not a sign of a dying company.
The macro is not great right now. The world economy is on a razor's edge. If things unwind, we could all be in for a world of economic hurt. There aren't many levers to pull us out this time around, either.
Crypto is in an even worse state. Investors want liquidity for the uncertainty. Plus there's the looming Q-day that keeps getting pushed earlier and earlier by the experts while we're also inching nearer and nearer on the clock.
This cycle is about max extraction and fraud - Legitimized by the presidential family cashing out billions in meme coins, insider trading and forks of existing protocols.
Hacks have also been hitting hard. North Korea has stolen 500m this year alone and 2b last year.
So… no thriving. On the opposite. Dying is a more appropriate word at this time. Some would call this an opportunity. I see more pain ahead.
No wonder Coinbase is laying off people with the excuse of AI. The reality is that volume is zero. At this stage only me and a bunch of other retail weirdos keep on buying bitcoin paycheck by paycheck…
Crypto volume comes from institutional liquidity, not retail. All of that liquidity has moved from crypto to AI. It turns out that the liquidity wasn't actually interested in the technology or the philosophy; they were interested in outsized ROI. Think of BTC not as a currency, but as a share of stock in the crypto technology sector.
That's the problem with building your castle on a quicksand whose fundamentals aren't in the same order of magnitude as the market cap you command. When all you truly offer is gambling, eventually a shinier casino will open up and eat your lunch.
Experienced high IQ player in a team sport could also be considered player-coach. Players like Lebron James or Nikola Jokic come to mind.
Do they not see that this will drastically change their lives for the worse? I'm in Europe, none of them has ever earned "fuck you" money.
Bill Russell is (was) the guy you’re looking for and he is arguably the greatest basketball player of all time.
F these leaders.
Well today is your lucky day!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_NBA_player-coaches
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Major_League_Baseball_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Rose
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player-coach#Player-coaches_in...
"Though primarily known as a dominant forward "Mr. Hockey" for the Detroit Red Wings, he came out of retirement in 1973 at age 45 to play with his sons and took on coaching responsibilities with Houston."[1]
[1] Gordie Howe, playing on the same NHL team as his two sons.
Geeks who didn't even stand near professional sports should really shut up about anything sport related, lol.
I would really like to see professional, established coach running around with young prodigies on a peak of their biology.
> - AI-native pods: We’ll be concentrating around AI-native talent who can manage fleets of agents to drive outsized impact. We’ll also be experimenting with reduced pod sizes, including “one person teams” with engineers, designers, and product managers all in one role.
And AI clowns will cheer and applaud this, not seeing that they're now doing the job of 5(!) people with the same salary. Why is nobody talking about this?
Also, I find it really bizarre that those neo feudal lords see their companies as just a life stock to count. They don't even count people, just see them as numbers to reduce/scale up. Modern tsardom, but instead of being tied via official decree you're now tied by your lifestyle and family.
"Some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make"